Twitter boss wants ‘billion users’ to ‘topple Facebook’

Chief executive of Twitter Dick Costolo has revealed he wants his microblogging platform to be as big as rival firm Facebook, with one billion users.

Costolo took aim at the milestone Facebook only reached in October after nine years of operation.

Twitter only has 500million users and has been running for seven years.

Costolo said they ‘don’t think about his firm’s goals in terms of other companies’, adding that ‘where we want to get to is human scale, global scale. That’s a billion users, not where we are today,’ the Daily Mail reports.

Twitter and Facebook are bitter rivals and last year came to blows over photo sharing service Instagram.

Facebook eventually bought the site for one billion dollars, but only after talks with Twitter for a 525 million dollars plus Twitter stocks deal fell through.

According to the paper, Costolo also discussed the tit-for-tat scraps with Facebook that have made their feud bitter and very public.

In one such conflict, Instagram shut off an option that let Twitter users show Instagram pictures, prompting Twitter to introduce its own photo filters to encourage users to switch away from Instagram , the paper added.

ANI